THE AUDIENCE WAS back in its seats. Ryan was doing his best to look like just one more classical music fan. Then Hudson and Trent reentered the box.
“Well?” Ryan rasped.
“Bloody good music, isn’t it?” Hudson replied casually. “This Rozsa chap is first-rate. Amazing that a communist country can turn out anything better than a reprise of the Internationale. Oh, after it’s over,” Hudson added, “how about a drink with some new friends?”
Jack let out a very long breath. “Yeah, Andy, I’d like that.” Son of a bitch, Ryan thought. It’s really going to happen. He had lots of doubts, but they’d just subsided half a step or so. It wasn’t really very much, but it was a damned sight better than it could have been.
THE SECOND HALF of the concert started with more Bach, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Instead of strings, this one was a celebration of brass, and the lead cornet here might have taught Louis Armstrong himself something about the higher notes. This was as much Bach as Ryan had ever heard at one time, and that old German composer had really had his shit wired, the former Marine thought, for the first time relaxing enough to enjoy it somewhat. Hungary was a country that respected its music, or so it seemed. If there was anything wrong with this orchestra, he didn’t notice it, and the conductor looked as though he were in bed with the love of his life, so transfixed he was by the joy of the moment. Jack wondered idly if Hungarian women were any good at that. There was an earthy look to them, but not much smiling… Maybe that was the communist government. Russians were not known for smiling, either.
“SO, ANY NEWS? “Judge Moore asked.
Mike Bostock handed over the brief dispatch from London. “Basil says his COS Budapest is going to make his move tonight. Oh, you’ll love this part. The Rabbit is staying in a hotel right across the street from the KGB rezidentura.”
Moore’s eyes flared a bit. “You have to be kidding.”
“Judge, do you think I’d say that for the fun of it?”
“When does Ritter get back?”
“Later today, flying back on Pan Am. From what he sent to us from Seoul, everything went pretty well with the KCIA meetings.”
“He’ll have a heart attack when he finds out about BEATRIX,” the DCI predicted.
“It will get his eyes opened,” the Deputy DDO agreed.
“Especially when he finds out that this Ryan boy is in on it?”
“On that, sir, you can bet the ranch, the cattle, and the big house.”
Judge Moore had himself a good chuckle at that one. “Well, I guess the Agency is bigger than any one individual, right?”
“So they tell me, sir.”
“When will we know?”
“I expect Basil will let us know when the plane takes off from Yugoslavia. It’s going to be a long day for our new friends, though.”
THE NEXT SELECTION was Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Ryan recognized it as the tune played in a Navy recruiting commercial. It was a gentle piece, very different from that which had preceded it. He wasn’t sure if this evening’s performance was a showcase for Johann Sebastian or for the conductor. In either case, it was pleasant enough, and the audience was wildly appreciative, noisier than for the concert selection. One more piece. Ryan had a program, but hadn’t bothered looking at it, since it was printed in Magyar, and he couldn’t read Martian any better than he could decipher the spoken form.
The last selection was Pachelbel’s Canon, a justly famous piece, one that had always struck Ryan like a movie of a pretty girl saying her prayers back in the seventeenth century, trying to concentrate on her devotions instead of thinking about the handsome boy down the lane from her farmhouse—and not quite succeeding.
WITH THE END, Jozsef Rozsa turned to the audience, which leapt again to its feet and howled its approval for endless minutes. Yeah, Jack thought, the local boy had gone away, but he’d come home to make good, and the home boys from the old days were glad to have him back. The conductor hardly smiled, as though exhausted from running the marathon. And he was sweating, Jack saw. Was conducting that hard? If you were that far into it, maybe it was. He and his Brit companions were standing and applauding as much as everyone else—no sense standing out—before, finally, the noise stopped. Rozsa waved to the orchestra, which caused the cheering to continue, and then to the concertmaster of the orchestra, the first fiddle. It seemed gracious of Rozsa, but probably the thing you had to do if you wanted the musicians to put out their best for you. And then, at long last, it was time for the crowd to break up.
“Enjoy the music, Sir John?” Hudson asked with a sly grin.
“It beats what they play on the radio at home,” Ryan observed. “Now what?”
“Now we get a nice drink in a quiet place.” Hudson nodded to Trent, who made his own way off, and took Ryan in tow.
The air was cool outside. Ryan immediately lit a cigarette, along with every other man in view and most of the women. Hungarians didn’t plan to live all that long, or so it seemed. He felt as tied to Hudson as a child to his mother, but that wouldn’t last too much longer. The street had mostly apartment-type buildings. In a Western city, it would have been condos, but those probably didn’t exist here. Hudson waved for Ryan to follow and they walked two blocks to a bar, ending up following about thirty people leaving the concert. Andy got a corner booth from which he could scan the room, and a waiter came with a couple glasses of wine.
“SO, WE GO?” Jack asked.
Hudson nodded. “We go. I told him we’d be to the hotel about one-thirty.”
“And then?”
“And then we drive to the Yugoslav border.”
Ryan didn’t ask further. He didn’t have to.
“The security to the south is trivial. Different the other way,” Andy explained. “Near the Austrian border, it’s fairly serious, but Yugoslavia, remember, is a sister communist state—that’s the local fiction in any case. I’m no longer sure what Yugoslavia is, politically speaking. The border guards on the Hungarian side do well for themselves—many friendly arrangements with the smugglers. That is a growth industry, but the smart ones don’t grow too much. Do that and the Belügyminisztérium, their Interior Ministry, might take notice. Better to avoid that,” Hudson reminded him.
“But if this is the back door into the Warsaw Pact—hell, KGB’s gotta know, right?”
Hudson completed the question. “So, why don’t they shut things down? I suppose they could, but the local economy would suffer, and the Sovs get a lot of the things they like here, too. Trent tells me that our friend has made some major purchases here. Tape machines and pantyhose—bloody pantyhose, their women kill for the things. Probably most are overtly intended for friends and colleagues back in Moscow. So, if KGB intervened, or forced the AVH to do so, then they would lose a source of things they themselves want. So a little corruption doesn’t do any major damage, and it supplies the greed of the other side. Never forget that they have their weaknesses, too. Probably more than we do, in fact, much as people argue to the contrary. They want the things we have. Official channels can’t work very well, but the unofficial ones do. There’s a saying in Hungarian that I like: A nagy kapu mellett, mindig van egy kis kapu. Next to the big gate, there is always a little door. That little door is what makes things work over here.”
“And I’m going through it.”
“Correct.” Andy finished his wine and decided against another. He had a ways to drive tonight, in the dark, over inferior roads. Instead, he lit one of his cigars.
Ryan lit a smoke of his own. “I’ve never done this before, Andy.”
“Frightened?”
“Yeah,” Jack admitted freely. “Yeah, I am.”
“First time is never easy. I’ve never had people with machine guns come into my home.”
“I don’t recommend it as after-dinner entertainment,” Jack replied, with a twisted smile. “But we managed to luck our way out of it.”
“I don’t really believe in luck—well, sometimes, perhaps. Luck does not go about in search of a fool, Sir John.”
“Maybe so. Kinda hard to notice from the inside.” Ryan thought back, again, to that dreadful night. The feel of the Uzi in his hands. Having to get that one shot right. No second chance in that ballgame. And he’d dropped to one knee, taken aim, and gotten it right. He’d never learned the name of the guy in the boat he’d stitched up. Strange, he reflected. If you kill a man right by your home, you should at least know his name.